5 ms·

Knowing nothing about Chinese, I'm curious how we arrive at 曼德博 being "Mandelbrot". How does the language handle foreign names and loan words?

• contingencies 7y ago
  There are essentially two methods: phonetic transliterations (Mandelbrot = 曼德博 = man de bo) and translation (computer = 电脑 = diannao = 'electric brain'). As the former tend to look weird, and are most often proper names, they are often especially punctuated to distinguish them from the rest of a paragraph.
  • yorwba 7y ago
    > they are often especially punctuated to distinguish them from the rest of a paragraph. Wenyan-lang does this, but it's not really common in normal texts. The reader is just expected to figure it out themselves. Also note that màn dé bó is the Pinyin transcription of 曼德博 and only reflects the Mandarin pronunciation. In Zhengzhang Shangfang's reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation, it would be more like moːn tɯːɡ paːɡ. Those syllable-final consonants are preserved in many other Sinitic languages, like Cantonese (that's how they were reconstructed) so Mandarin-based transliterations don't work well for those. As an alternative, 勃 (also Mandarin bó) has the reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation bɯːd, which is a closer approximation of the "brot" in "mandelbrot".
    • contingencies 7y ago
      it's not really common in normal texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation
      • yorwba 7y ago
        And which of these punctuation marks is used to mark something as a transliteration? The middle dot • serves as spacing in multi-part names, but that doesn't tell you where the transliteration begins or ends.
        • contingencies 7y ago
          Very often 《…》/ <…> / 「…」are used to delimit transliterated proper names.
          • yorwba 7y ago
            I've only seen angle brackets used to indicate titles of books, movies, etc., and regardless of whether the name is transliterated or not. The corner bracket quotation marks are more typical of Traditional Chinese typography, which I don't see as often, since I mostly read writing by mainlanders.
  • taejo 7y ago
    Given that "Mandelbrot" is German for "almond bread", the translation approach would also be possible... except that almonds don't seem to have been known in China in the classical period.
• phantom0308 7y ago
  It's transliteration. There are characters and sounds that are used to mimic the sound of foreign words. 曼德博 sounds like man de bwo (man4de2bo2 in pinyin). 迈克 (Mike) sounds like my ke